DOC African Magic: Traditional Ideas That Heal A Continent by Heidi Holland in History

Description

This is the biggest; grandest; most sprawling epic ever told; filled with battles and hardship; courage; determination; daring voyages into the unknown; and eye-opening discoveries... From the Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer of FDR; Winston Churchill; and Somerset Maugham; Wilderness At Dawn is the sprawling; roughhouse epic of the unsung heroes; heroines; and rogues who tamed the rugged continent that became our country. Here is a masterpiece of history; research; and storytelling; the panoramic epic of the North American continent and the vast array of characters who thought they could civilize it. Concentrating on those previously ignored by "polite histories" (ordinary settlers; unknown soldiers; scalawags; pioneer women; slaves; and Native Americans); Morgan uses scenes and dialogue from actual letters; journals; and diaries to recreate the odysseys; adventures; human dramas; and inhuman suffering that shaped America. Beginning with prehistoric man's first forays across the Bering Land Bridge; Morgan unfurls a rich tapestry of lost civilizations and Indian accomplishments; ambitious explorers; would-be politicians and transplanted Europeans confronting the wilderness; scrappy newborn towns and dandified plantation societies; great river navigations and catastrophic explorations; the bloody Indian wars and the birth of the American revolution. All are here - the triumphs; tragedies; battles and intrigues from the Ice Age when Early Man roamed an empty continent to the achievement of the all-American dream of "Land for Every Man." Morgan takes us into the world of the lost Anasazi people; where inventive Indians built houses of 500 rooms; veritable "cities of stone" tucked amongthe canyon walls. He takes us into the lives of the Indians of the Southwest where a shipwrecked Spanish explorer named Cabeza de Vaca became an indentured servant (and later medicine man) to a tribe of Indian fishermen. We see the arrival of the first Jews in North America; the ha